Articles

NO AIR

All evening I’ve tried to catch my breath, a heaviness pervades. Opening windows alleviates nothing, no breath to be caught since that night I fell for you in ways I’d thought not possible, over the wine we didn’t spill. You have bedded down my waking thoughts in a slumber so deep I may never come again to appreciate the silk lining of a kid glove, finding fingers shape softness. And as you say my name for the first time the taste is new and unfamiliar. When the heat breaks, you’re still in my head, like the scent of perfume that will not fade. In those small hours your shadow claims the light of all that is natural.

ANTICIPATION

From afar it comes like the smell of rain in off the sea, with an urgency of waves breaking you weaken at the thought of it happening again, as naturally as heat making its presence felt on the globe of your palms, you spread your fingers wide as water between two bodies of land, trace boundaries, sea stacks ’n coves on the bend of where paradise might be. Your judgement clouds like a compass that’s let moisture in, devoid of magnetic field you falter, give way to the rhythm of waves as though sirens in pursuit of kelp and driftwood like lovers on a beach.

ANNE FITZGERALD is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin and Queen’s University, Belfast. Her poetry collections are Swimming Lessons (Wales, Stonebridge Press, 2001), The Map of Everything (Dublin, Forty Foot Press, 2006) and Beyond the Sea (Co. Clare, Salmon Poetry, 2013). She is a recipient of the Ireland Fund of Monaco Writer-in-Residence bursary at The Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco (2007). For more information see www.fortyfootpress.com.